She described the audition process as “nerve wracking and exciting”
A 22-year-old Indian American student, Ramita Ravi, has made her entry into the Emmy Award-winning dance reality show of Fox TV So You Think You Can Dance with an amazing performance that combines both Indian classical dance and contemporary.
During the auditions for the show’s season 14 in New York, the Murrysville, Pennsylvania, native impressed the judges by a performance on Jai Wolf’s Indian Summer’ and selected for the choreography round.
“I’ve been watching the show since its first season. It’s always been a dream of mine to audition. My best friend in college auditioned for the show a few years ago, and he encouraged me to try out this year,” Ravi told the Tribune Review.
She described the audition process as “nerve wracking and exciting.”
Before the New York auditions, she performed two solos, a group routine and choreography in hip hop, contemporary, ballroom, and jazz in the preliminary rounds for her first reality television competition.
According to the triblive.com report, Ravi credits instructors Jaya Mani, Julia Coxon Saltsman and Debbie Rogers for her performances in Bharatanatyam and contemporary, jazz and hip hop.
Ravi has been dancing competitively since she was five years old and already won ten regional titles. She also won the National Miss Headliner in 2013. Ravi is a 2013 graduate of Pittsburgh’s the Ellis School. She holds a bachelor’s degree in health and societies from the University of Pennsylvania and is now pursuing her master’s in public health in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
“Eventually, I plan to work in health innovation/entrepreneurship with a dance career on the side,” triblive.com quoted Ravi.
The dancer found the talent surrounded her in New York unbelievable and said that fusing classical and contemporary helped her to express her own Indian American identity.
“Other Indian dance styles, such as Bollywood, have been shown on the program; however, I was the first contestant representing an Indian style who was fortunate enough to progress as far as I did,” she said, adding that her aim with sharing this style is to inspire future generations of Indian Americans, or individuals with mixed identities.
Ravi also plans to relocate to dance professionally through her studies with Brinda Guha’s Kalamandir Dance Company in New York and has been able to perform across the country and to teach guest classes at Broadway Dance Center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtNsR3On1c4